BOOK ONE

Part 3

A branch cracked under her boot, sounding as if she had just stepped on a beetle. Hermione suppressed a shiver and cautiously looked up at the child —boy or girl, she couldn't be sure— who was crouched among some bushes with huge red flowers and long filaments growing up to two metres high. The creature seemed no older than six. For a human. A tiara of eucalyptus leaves crowned its small head, and its eyes —two marbles as black as spilled ink— and the horns that twisted backward on either side of its head betrayed its fairy nature. Despite this, and despite being fully aware of the tricks of its kind, Hermione found herself unable to completely ignore a child who was sobbing with its right ankle caught in a hole of muddy earth. The tears sliding down the fairy's cheeks looked like silver beads; they shimmered in a bluish-white tone.

Hermione took a small breath and moved a bit closer.

"It's alright, I can help you," she spoke softly, ready to pull away if necessary, ignoring the judgement and disdain in Malfoy's gaze, who had made it clear through threatening hisses what he thought of her actions. "I'm not going to hurt you."

She could hear the other man clicking his tongue. They had been advancing for several hours, time passed confusingly in that place, but so far they had managed to get by without much conversation. The tension was palpable; Hermione despised him deeply, and to say Malfoy was disgusted by her would be an understatement, but a greater goal—to get out of there—had kept those emotions under control. Or so it had been until, shortly after exiting an underground cave, they had entered a forest of barren trees where the only vegetation that flourished were those gigantic scarlet flowers, standing out against the barren landscape like pools of fresh blood. The first surprise had been to discover that the trees here no longer grew from top to bottom; the pinkish sky stretched rotten and faint overhead, clear of any obstacles. The tense silence had then broken when the fairy creature appeared in their field of view, and Hermione had decided she couldn't just leave it there, even if she risked falling into a trap.

"I know what I'm doing, it might be of help to us and I don't owe you any explanations!"

"I see I should have made sure that a riffraff like you understands what a truce is," Malfoy hissed, deadly; his blonde hair, always impeccable, was covered in dust and looked more grey than blonde. "Certainly Gryffindor, incompetent and..."

But Hermione had ignored his diatribe with a stoicism that, had she seen it from the outside, would have impressed even herself. Be that as it may, she wasn't going to let Malfoy's opinions, however logical they might be, dictate her decisions. Yes, they had a "truce"—a very tenuous one—yet Malfoy was mistaken if he thought he held the reins of that agreement. She couldn't allow it, she couldn't relax. And she couldn't just leave an injured child without even trying to find out if it was a trap, whether it was human or not. After making her position clear to Malfoy, his fury had turned into icy indifference, he arched an eyebrow and said, "Don't expect my help, handing you over to the Dark Lord isn't worth that much." Since then, he had leaned against one of the leafless, withered trees, with a carefree and slightly curious attitude, not much different from a scientist analysing the behaviour of a new specimen.

That's how he was now, distracting Hermione with each new remark.

"I wouldn't be too sad if they ate your head. Look at that, one less Mudblood to worry about," he whispered dissolutely as he cleaned the dirt from under his nails. "I would applaud with joy."

Hermione felt a chill run down her spine, unsure whether it was from spite or fear, because after all, those omens weren't entirely unlikely. A sharp breeze had started to blow, cooling the sweat on her temples and the nape of her neck. Her eyes didn't stray from those of the fairy, which looked back at her, awash with tears.

"It can't even be said to be a loss of intelligence," the other man continued. "It's clear that the world tends to... overvalue some people."

"Can you keep quiet for a minute?"

"Certainly."

The fairy had stopped sobbing and was just looking at her, its expression tense and occasionally shifting its attention to Malfoy, but only for a few seconds. Perhaps it didn't trust the two of them there, could it feel surrounded? It was also possible it was calculating whether it could devour her comfortably with two of them around. Hermione swallowed hard and took another step forward. The mud made the ground unstable.

"I'm not… I'm not going to let him hurt you either, do you need…?" she faltered as she noticed the fairy's body suddenly stiffen, tensing her up as a reflex.

Its eyes widened drastically, almost like two tar balls hanging from their sockets. Maybe she should abort the mission, it certainly wasn't worth the risk. Even if helping a fairy could provide them with help they undoubtedly needed. This was starting to look more and more like a trap.

When it happened, it was too quick. She had barely taken a step back when the fairy showed fangs as shiny as if they had been carved from diamonds and emitted a hiss that reminded her of Crookshanks when he felt threatened. Hermione thought she heard a scream, though she couldn't be sure it hadn't been her own. In her peripheral vision, an iridescent flash exploded, blinding everything around her, a whirlwind of fireworks erased the landscape and for a time—seconds, maybe minutes—Hermione was acutely aware of her own heartbeat, pounding hard in her ears, temples, alongside the trachea and sternum, echoing with another sound, deeper and more resounding, but at the same time seemed exhausted and devoid of hope; a lifeless sound that, nevertheless, continued beating and clinging to life. Hermione felt both pulses within her. She trembled with them, confused and terrified, as a sensation of suffocation and vertigo added to the disorientation of being unable to see anything at all. Part of her knew Malfoy must also be there, she wondered if he had fainted and left her to her fate, or if, on the contrary, he would manage to drag her to Voldemort taking advantage of her state. What was happening to her? What had the fairy done? Was it affecting Malfoy too? Merlin, she hoped so. Truce or no truce, if she fell unconscious in the hands of someone like Malfoy, a Death Eater...

When the ordeal began to become unbearable, the sensation ended. Hermione regained awareness of the space around her, her vision returned, and both the rhythmic sound of her heartbeat and the other that had accompanied it faded away. She staggered, just for a moment, and thought she heard Malfoy's voice.

"—a pretentious, ignorant, and irreverent Mudblood!" He grabbed her by the hair, as he had done hours ago, and Hermione suppressed a moan. The other man's gaze was angry and unyielding. "Make that spawn reverse its... magic," he ordered, and sharply turned her head toward the fairy.

"It's just a kid," she murmured, feeling Malfoy's nails digging into her nape.

"Splendid."

Hermione breathed lightly. The fairy offspring was still watching them from its niche within the wildflower bush. It had its head tilted and its eyes impossibly large. But yes, Malfoy was right. It had done something to them. Something innocent, a bad taste joke from an offspring of one of the most twisted races in the magical world; or maybe something much worse. She couldn't even define why she knew, beyond feeling strange, broader, more fluid, despite knowing she was still the same.

More full.

"This... isn't right," she finally said, addressing the fairy. "We have matters to attend to on our Earth, we are here by mistake. But our companions are looking for us. The Ministry of Magic won't take long to find us, and I don't want to cause you any trouble, so if you could remove whatever it is that..."

The fairy blinked slowly, then melted back into the bushes and disappeared, leaving her with her words hanging. Her foot was no longer stuck in the mud.

Malfoy fumed.

His rage made Hermione feel genuine terror. The man had terrified her during her first years at Hogwarts, but that fear had always been accompanied by a deep and ingrained disgust for people with mindsets like his. In the end, the disgust had prevailed over the fear. Now, however, deprived of magic, and with the other man's large, strong hands around her neck and the gaze of a true madman, the terror resurfaced with force.

"Let... me go."

"This is your fault," he hissed, almost spitting out the words. "And you're naive if you think this situation gives you the upper hand with me. Clearly you're not aware of who you're dealing with. Do I need to remind you?"

He had cornered her against the thick stem of one of those huge and slender flowers the colour of freshly fallen blood, pressing his thumbs into her neck as if it were butter. He was choking her.

"Please," she said barely, her eyes tearing up as she gasped in a crude attempt to get air into her lungs. "This is..."

She was never sure what she would have said. Barely seeing it, a quick and precise movement, like a whip, unfolded from her right. She heard the scream and then air came back to her lungs. She gasped, vaguely aware that saliva was dripping down her chin and that something had attacked her aggressor; the scream had been his. Still trembling, partly from the lack of oxygen and partly from the terror that had devastated her, she struggled to focus on what was happening.

Malfoy was on the ground, with his torso half upright as he tried to free himself from one of those huge and magnificent blood-coloured flowers. It had closed around one of his arms. It has teeth, Hermione thought for a moment, unable to react or even know the correct way to react when a carnivorous plant was trying to swallow the arm of one of your mortal enemies. Turn around, Hermione, run. No truce with someone like Lucius Malfoy could end well, she didn't have to endure this, now she had the chance to escape. Alone, in the fairy world. As frightening as the idea was, suddenly, it seemed a much better forecast than one in which she also had to worry about a Death Eater not killing her, with or without magic. She swallowed as she watched with morbid astonishment how that strange jaw chewed slowly more and more flesh, climbing up the forearm, the velvety petals closing around the limb. She tried to ignore the man's hoarse moans of fury and pain, his laboured breathing, the blood that dripped and stained the barren earth, the paleness of his face... Maybe Hermione was a Gryffindor, but where did nobility end and folly begin?

Without taking her eyes off, she took a step back away from the repugnant scene. Then another. And another.

And she probably should have kept moving away, but later Hermione wouldn't even know why she did what she did when Malfoy's grey eyes met hers and his face contorted with desperation and horror stirred something inside her that propelled her forward without thinking twice.

She went for the stem on instinct. She grabbed it and dug her nails into the thick green stem, leaving deep crescent-shaped grooves. She pulled and pulled, with adrenaline pumping strongly in her veins and not a single coherent thought from which to draw any clarity. But the firmness of that carnivorous plant was no joke. Malfoy's muffled scream reached her when she shook the stem with an especially strong jerk, leveraging her heels for momentum. The only thought that crossed her mind when she grabbed the wand from one of the back pockets of her trousers was it's going to tear his arm off and wouldn't that be fantastic? She drove the tip of her useless wand into the stem. A horrendous and inhuman howl swept the wasteland followed by a dull thud. Hermione gasped in shock when a green and viscous liquid spurted from the plant's wound, oozing around the hole she had made with the wand and staining her hands. The plant thrashed in the air, above their heads a couple of times, and fell flat. The impact made the coal-coloured earth tremble. A tremor ran through Hermione's entire body, kneeling as she was on the ground, next to the corpse. She coughed in the dust cloud that had risen.

In the quiet that followed, Lucius Malfoy's silent gasps were deafening. Without moving from where she was, Hermione looked at him. Her eyes were fixed by inertia on his left arm.

It was destroyed. But it was still there.

Gathering strength, she got up and approached the other wizard, avoiding the undulating fallen stem. She wasn't going to look at that horrendous denture. She wasn't going to look.

She didn't look. Instead, she focused on Malfoy. She only hesitated for a moment before crouching beside him. The flesh of his arm was torn and the skin was in tatters, especially around the elbow and forearm area. The tendons and part of the muscle were visible, and the partially torn pieces of flesh formed disgusting nodules that nearly made her vomit.

Malfoy hissed, little more than a puff of air, catching her attention. Sweat beaded his forehead and his skin had the worrying colour of stale mushrooms, those you find at the back of the fridge and don't know what to do with. She didn't know if he was going to faint or vomit, but she didn't wait for him to speak.

"I could kill you with my own hands right now."

As if Hermione needed reminding of that. However, it wouldn't be at that moment, when he was practically unable to focus his gaze and keep his body upright.

"You'll pay for this," he insisted in a whisper.

Hermione frowned. A dry breeze rose and stirred her curls; she brushed them away from her face so they wouldn't bother her and forced Malfoy to lie down. What surprised her more, her composure or the fact that his other shoulder was so affected by the pain as to let himself be handled, was a mystery. She opened his eyes and tried to focus his gaze; his pupils were dilated. Poison? Some type of toxin? It seemed the most likely, even though her opinion of Malfoy was deplorable, she didn't consider him the type of person to be reduced to such a state just because his arm was nearly eaten. She felt the terror and fear, the hysteria, breaking through the walls of her resolve, and she had to take a deep breath to refocus.

There was no time to fall apart.

She had to think. Think fast. Because the smartest thing was to leave him to his fate; moreover, she had to do it. But she hadn't dirtied her hands for nothing. Never better said, she thought as she wiped the greenish secretion on her pants, surprised by her own cynicism.

"It's okay," she said with cold determination. "I wouldn't carry you on my back even if I could, but obviously I can't. It seems you've been injected with some kind of toxin, but we have nothing here. Nothing to treat you with, and it's clear you can't walk in this condition." She wasn't sure if the other man had enough mental clarity to grasp and understand what she was saying, but she continued speaking. "At least we need to clean that wound. I'm going to have to go look for water, there was a small stream just before we left the cave, remember? You'll have to wait here meanwhile."

Maybe if he rested a bit, the effects would lessen. She could only hope it would be that way. That the toxin—if that's what it was; she hadn't forgotten where they were—had dazed him, like some kind of diazepam, and that it wasn't lethal. The worst that could happen is a Death Eater dies, she thought, but immediately scolded herself because she was on the side of the light; she wasn't going to stoop so low as to trivialise the death of someone currently defenceless. But to think of Lucius Malfoy as defenceless was like comparing a werewolf to a golden retriever puppy. She stood up to pick up her wand from the ground, cleaned it, put it away, and, after a great effort, managed to drag the man to the nearest tree, without any of those odious plants close enough to pose a problem, and propped him against it.

She gave him one last look before turning around. Maybe she would find something with which to try to extract some of the poison; maybe the reeds she had seen a while ago, growing horizontally from one of the black rock walls of the cave.

"Are you going to leave me here? I would do it to you. Owing my life to a Mudblood is... but Draco and Cissy... I can't abandon them. Please."

The words stopped her dead, the sensation similar to having received a kick in the stomach. She clenched her jaw so tightly that the tension also spread to her neck and shoulders. How dared he beg for mercy, beg her for mercy? Nevertheless, when she turned with the sharpness of steel on the tip of her tongue, what was her surprise to find the man with his eyelids closed and a completely relaxed expression, only belied by the extreme paleness and extremely shallow breathing. She stopped. Had she imagined it?

No, she wasn't sure. She felt slightly dizzy and thought she could hear the throbbing of a heartbeat... like before. An explosion of iridescent light.

She shook her head and rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands, exhausted. A moment later, she set off, without giving another thought to reflecting on what she was doing or why.